Publishing Watriquet's Dits

"Publishing Watriquet's Dits," Watriquet de Couvin, fourteenth-century vernacular poet and minstrel, served the coterie of the counts of Valois in the late Capetian court. His poems, nearly all dits, survive in five manuscript collections produced by a single Parisian libraire whose identity can be surmised. Something of the contents of five other collections of Watriquet's verse, formerly in the library of King Charles V, can be identified from descriptions in the library's inventory. Although the collections were not identical either in content or in sequence, one sees within them smaller groupings that indicate how the poet kept his texts, Watriquet was involved in the production of the collections of his works, especially in devising the iconography of the illuminated manuscripts. In both text and image he indicates his acquaintance with an important contemporary book, the Roman de Fauvel in BNF fr, 146-whose creators, like Watriquet, probably also belonged to the Valois circle.